January 31, 2013

Dorks On A Plane

What happens when you strap a couple of GoPros onto the bottom of the B-24 you’ve talked your way aboard? There’s only one way to find out!

Last Memorial Day my friend Bruce Bullis (Adobe video engineering) and I managed to ride a vintage bomber out of Moffett Field. Bruce charmed the GoPro folks into lending us a couple of cameras that we could mount on the outside of the plane, and we carried a Canon 5D Mk II and our iPhones aboard the plane.

Lessons learned, in brief:

Wind is a bitch. The tail-mounted GoPro got blown upwards almost immediately. I’ll spare you 15 minutes of extremely close-up footage of an airplane’s tail.

SLR video is hard. I’m not used to the Mk II (my “vintage” 5D doesn’t shoot video), and I found it really hard to compose & focus shots via the LCD panel. That’s especially true in tight quarters, like the rear plexiglass gun turret where I kept bonking with my lens. (This was all while trying not to fall out the open windows, or through the bomb bay doors, etc.) At least I’m happy with the stills we captured.

Video stabilization can work wonders but isn’t a silver bullet. The video embedded above was greatly improved by the Warp Stabilizer in Premiere Pro CS6, but some movements still produce that “jelly cam” effect.

January 30, 2013

DARPA tech: Cool with a side of creepy

Generating 600 GB of data per second (eat your heart out, RED cam), the 1.8-gigapixel ARGUS camera will hitch a ride on drones, spotting targets as small as six inches from an altitude of 20,000 feet. TechCrunch reports,

The camera uses 368 five-megapixel camera sensors aimed through a telescopic array to pick out birds in flight and humans on the move on the Earth’s surface. ARGUS stands for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System.

Elsewhere, acronym-lovin’ DARPA wants you to design an amphibious Fast, Adaptable, Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG). Somehow I’m kinda weirded out by their appropriating a breezy whiteboard aesthetic more often seen in TED talks:

January 29, 2013

Tonight at Adobe SJ: The Art of Photography in the Photoshop Era

The San Jose Photoshop User Group is hosting Harold Davis tonight at 7 PM in the Park conference room at Adobe HQ. Pizza will be served at 6:30 PM.

Harold Davis is an award-winning professional photographer and the author of many bestselling books on photography and image processing including Creating HDR Photos: The Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Photography (Amphoto), Photographing Flowers: Exploring Macro Worlds with Harold Davis (Focal Press) andCreative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley Publishing). His images are widely published, collected and commissioned, and his popular photo workshops are often sold out. Harold is a Moab Paper Printmaking Master. Learn more about Harold and his photography at www.photoblog2.com. Harold lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Phyllis, and their four children.

Friday Demo/Q&A: Rich, Responsive Web Design and Animation

It’s amazing what you can create with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Using Adobe’s tools – Edge Animate and the Creative Cloud web tooling, you don’t have to stare at code all day. Join Worldwide Web Evangelist Paul Trani on a tour for how-to create rich animation and interactivity with content that can be responsive and change based on your screen size.

January 28, 2013

Adobe & Sundance, Part 1

Explore AE’s history with its creators, this Thursday

Did you know that the first version of AE didn’t even have a timeline? Check out this screenshot from Dan Wilk (click to enlarge):

As part of AE’s 20th Anniversary celebration, you can:

Join After Effects creators Dave Simons and Dan Wilk as they take you on a trip down memory lane to see how After Effects started—from concept to initial user interface. See how much After Effects has changed throughout the years and why things are simply the way they are.

January 27, 2013

Happy Birthday, After Effects!

“I can’t believe I’m talking to these guys,” I thought. “They’re spending their time talking to me–and they’re so down-to-earth!”

That was in 2000, when I first met the brains behind After Effects. (I’d just joined Adobe, aspiring to build “AE for the Web.”) 13 years later, I still feel just the same. In any industry full of half-hit wonders acting like they’ve just cured cancer, I find Dave, Dan, and all the AE guys as relentlessly humble & passionate as can be.

So “Happy 20th anniversary to After Effects, the video package you keep promising yourself you’ll learn someday,” as I saw Matt May quip the other day. Here some pros salute this game-changing app:

January 26, 2013

How Lego Hobbits are sculpted

I love that Lego has started featuring their product designers in these short pieces. Here Gitte Thorsen (and you just knew Legos were designed by someone named “Gitte Thorsen,” right?) shows how she sketches out Hobbit characters, then sculpts them at large scale:

January 25, 2013

A TED talk on the power of image

At some point I lost track of (and most interest in) all the hand-wringing articles about Photoshop & body image. Even so, I found this talk by model Cameron Russell interesting. She’s unusually sharp (her mom founded ZipCar, it turns out) and compares images of her with the real person.

Her points about models’ insecurities remind me of life in Silicon Valley: the more fortunate one is, the more one feels compelled to do & achieve even more (and the worse for not doing it). When I’m touring a potential kindergarten I think, “What kickass disruptive badassery am I missing out on?” I never think “I was 26 and living in Palo Alto and working on Photoshop”; it’s all “Facebook was taking shape down the street; what kind of loser misses out on that?” Talk about kindergarten… [Via]

January 24, 2013

Boss Wave! 8-bit mayhem in the real world

“If you don’t watch this music video,” writes io9, “you’re robbing yourself of an opportunity to see a particularly fantastic video of a guy in an awesome robot suit blasting real-life videogame enemies (along with a few innocent bystanders). Just sayin’.” Indeed.

January 23, 2013

Mixel for iPhone builds Instagram-friendly collages

I’ve been a fan of Mixel for a long time, and now it’s become much more useful to me as it creates square collages that can be sent directly to Instagram.

I find this highly useful after shooting a burst of shots of my kids (as one never knows which one will best capture fast-moving action): I select an arbitrary number of shots, feed them to Mixel, let it auto-create a collage, and then shuffle or manually adjust the results as desired. It’s often a faster, visually richer alternative to apps like Diptic (which I also like). It’s not something I use constantly, but when I do want it, I find the $1.99 well worth the investment.

In semi-related news, Mixel has been acquired by Etsy. Congrats to Khoi & the team.

Designing one new superhero every day for a year

“I got into a rut, I wasn’t drawing enough and a friend told me I was over-thinking things,” says Downing. “I just needed to do something I was really into that wouldn’t require too much thinking. I started thinking about designing superheroes and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I threw the gauntlet down and decided to draw a super every day.”

Everett does more than draw, too, dreaming up backstories for the characters. I’m partial to the teams like married couple “Ball & Chain.”

Another unlikely favorite is “Dober-Man and Pincer,” a silly looking duo with a hilarious history “Altruistic exotic veterinarian Voss Brown was bitten by a genetically altered rabid doberman and given its approximate powers. He can run as fast as a pinscher and wields a dog-like fury! Together with his pet, Pincher (the now toothless dog that gave him his abilities) they pursue crime with a dogged determination!”

January 22, 2013

A film scanner for your smart phone

The Smartphone Film Scanner was conceived as a way to offer photographers and enthusiasts a quick, easy and portable way to scan 35mm films. It offers unrivaled speed and convenience when compared to other film scanners. In addition, the scanner will work with a free integrated Lomoscanner App, which allows you to easily edit and share your scans.

January 21, 2013

We’d like to invite the Photoshop community to share their photo manipulations with us for a chance to win some special prizes. Every week, from now through February 7th, we will post an image from the Faking It exhibit that will serve as inspiration for that week’s submissions. Photoshop fans can submit their own altered photograph showing their interpretation of the theme, and at the end of each week, a random winner will be chosen to receive a print copy of the 296-page exhibition companion Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop by Mia Fineman.

In addition to the weekly winners, participants who submit a video screencast of their entry, showing how their image was created, will be eligible to win the grand prize; a trip for two to see the Faking It exhibit in person at either the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. or the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Photoshop customer profile: Illustrator Brian Haberlin

It’s really Faustian, meaning I will do anything it takes to get me to the final image. For example, I use both analog and digital techniques and go back and forth. I may print out my work, spray it with water, throw paint on it, scan it back in, or collage it with the original digital painting. I use anything from painting on a wet printout to using coffee as a paint source – whatever it takes to get there at the end of the day.

Brian shows his work & talks about key Photoshop features (Puppet Tool, Warp), favorite CS6 features (Background Save, Oil Paint), and more. (Note that a good chunk of the interview is inexplicably buried under a “More” link.)

January 20, 2013

Why Adobe publishes research

Adobe publishes some of its best work (e.g. tech behind Content-Aware Fill) in the academic community, rather than keeping it a trade secret, as some other big software companies do. Dan Goldman, one of the brains behind CAF, writes,

First, by encouraging publication, we make it attractive for the best minds in the business to come work in our labs – we count several former and current University professors among our ranks. Second, our researchers draw on the wealth of knowledge in the academic community as well – a great deal of our research is done in collaboration with graduate students like Connelly. And third, the rigorous demands of peer review keep us motivated to try truly new things – rather than being content to simply do all the old things better.

January 19, 2013

An incredibly rare Lego holiday gift

Mission accomplished, Invisible Creature: now I totally want to be your client, if it would get me a bitchin’ bespoke Lego creation.

We love our clients. We love Lego. So why not combine the two? For our annual Client Holiday gift this year, we decided to design a custom Eye Creature Lego kit. Edition of 6 sets. 444 pieces. 4 instruction booklets. 8 different mouth combinations – and a hinged top that allows the owner to store all kinds of fun items (as shown below). We even found 2 extremely cute kids from 1972 in my house that wanted to participate in the box design. Disclaimer: This product is NOT affiliated with Lego, folks – this was a gift. Oh, enough already. Check out how we made it below:

Demo: Future Adobe video tech, with a side of Grumpy Cat

And that shirt of Al’s. Man, that shirt… Wow. Can’t unsee. It has occasioned *way* too much internal discussion, with promises/threats to buy him the Mountain Men’s 10 Kittens Tee. (Review: “When I wear clothes with kittens, I require a much higher kitten-per-inch-of-shirt count than you’ve offered here. Can not recommend.”)

Napkin: Fast & clever image annotation

Longtime Adobe veteran Chris Parrish and the crew at Aged & Distilled have created Napkin, “the ultimate tool for concise visual communication,” designed to “painlessly annotate images or create diagrams and share the results quickly.” It looks rather slick:

Slow-mo photography: Top 10 Ways To Destroy A Snowman

January 15, 2013

Interesting animation: “Malaria”

It is, Edson Oda writes, “the story of Fabiano, a young Mercenary who is hired to kill Death. This short film combines Origami, Kirigami, Time lapse, nankin illustration, Comic Books and Western Cinema.”

Tips on tuning Lightroom performance

The Lightroom team maintains a page of tips on how to get maximum performance from the app. I’ve personally had great success keeping the app & its catalog on my laptop’s SSD (small, fast) while importing images to my traditional hard drive (big, slow). [Via]

January 14, 2013

Demo/Q&A this Friday: Photoshop for Web design

Here’s a how-to on mastering Photoshop from a web design perspective. From creating layouts for desktop and mobile, using color, text and exporting images and color palettes when needed, join us to see the power of Photoshop for web designers. And with the new update to Photoshop CS6 for Creative Cloud, members even have the ability to export CSS!

DesignScene app updated to v2.0

“Where do you find all this stuff?,” my blog readers often ask. Frequently the answer is “via DesignScene.” The iPad app has now gotten a comprehensive upgrade to version 2.0, adding collections (making it easier to round up images & links) and more.

January 13, 2013

Animation: “That Will Be The Day”

In first grade or so, I was blown away to see green contour lines on a black Apple II screen (not unlike this). Seeing this work from Matthew DiVito (maker of some great animated GIFs) would have melted my face clean off:

January 12, 2013

Is is real, or is it After Effects?

That’s what I found myself wondering as I watched Supralude‘s That Night In Williamsburg. He won’t spill many beans, but what do you think? Were those lights added in post, and how can you tell one way or the other?

“You talkin’ to *me*?” The Travis Bickle iPhone holder

January 09, 2013

Photography: Julieanne Kost’s “Moments Alone”

Every day, Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost shares a set of beautiful captures via Instagram. As she did last year, she’s compiled her favorites into a short video:

I’m sure that the images will mean more to me than they do to you, but I would encourage you to create a collection of your own images and look at them as a complete body of work for the year to see what you can discover about yourself.

January 08, 2013

Demo: Conditional actions in Photoshop CS6

Years ago, Jeff Schewe promised to buy me dinner if I could get support for conditional actions (i.e. simple automation that can feature if/then-type support) into Photoshop. We snuck it into ImageReady, but it took until now (the recent CS6 update for Creative Cloud members) for Photoshop to get this welcome feature. Here’s a quick demo:

What’s up with Adobe “giving away” CS2?

Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers.

Pictures were downloaded from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center and edited with Photoshop CS6. Even if they were Hi-res images shot with Nikon D3S cameras, a lot of noise removal and color correction was needed, especially for those shots at ISO 3200, which was the highest ISO speed limit I’ve allowed myself to use, exception made for the last sequence of the spinning world, which comes from a sequenze of shots taken at ISO 12800. […]

Editing was made with Adobe Premiere CS6, with a 2K workflow, which allowed me to scale, rotate and pan image sequences whose native resolution is 4K.

January 06, 2013

Tips: Workflow & asset management in Lightroom

In A Workflow Story, he’s posted 12 new video tutorials on the Lightroom location workflow & catalog management. “Watch these videos,” he writes, “and you will gain a complete understanding of effective Lightroom Catalog Management.” The series costs $29.95, and the video on updating folder locations is a free sample.

January 05, 2013

A psychedelic animation made with ink, white-out and coffee

Bizarre intricacy:

Boston-based animator Jake Fried just released his latest psychedelic animation, The Deep End, which was drawn entirely with ink, coffee, and white-out. The animation is continually layered on top of itself as forms morph, bend and transform across the screen.

January 04, 2013

More on Lightroom/WordPress integration

In response to yesterday’s post, a few people commented that they’d like to see more direct integration between Lightroom & WordPress sites. Dan Gerber of the Lightroom team notes that Adobe’s Terry White has posted some tips in which he recommends the LR/Blog plug-in, available for £8 ($12.86). I haven’t tried it, having settled on using LR’s built-in Flickr uploader. (I like that Flickr serves up a rich display dynamically using Flash or HTML depending on my viewers’ playback capabilities.)

Notre Dame & Adobe team up

This multimedia-packed app takes fans inside the locker room and onto the gridiron with the undefeated Fighting Irish during their 125th season of football, replaying the highlights of their climb to No. 1 and previewing their upcoming BCS Championship Game against Alabama. Enjoy articles, slideshows, infographics, interactive rosters, archival images and footage, and even a virtual tailgate party, exclusively on the iPad for fans of the Fighting Irish.

(As I may have neglected to mention, as of a recent update, Creative Cloud members can publish an unlimited number of DPS apps to the Apple App Store.)

The last of these is far & away the most obscure and, frankly, confusing. Photoshop doesn’t present any indication about which layers are linked to which others, and it doesn’t offer a Library panel for managing SO’s. (There’s so, so much potential yet to be unlocked here.)

In any case, Julieanne Kost uses a real-world example to demonstrate how to link Smart Objects together (simply duplicate them on the Layers panel) and how to duplicate & unlink them.

January 01, 2013

Photography: “Chasing Ice”

Photoshop engineer John Peterson (who’s been behind Photomerge, various vector improvements, and more) highly recommends the new documentary Chasing Ice:

It follows photographer James Balog as he travels the Arctic documenting the massive meltdown of the glaciers. Among other things, he and his crew set up over two dozen time-lapse cameras to capture the melting ice over a period of years. The footage they capture of the glaciers – in some cases melting completely out of frame – is amazing. Another team, camped out on a freezing ledge for over two weeks, were rewarded with footage of an ice shelf the size of lower Manhattan collapsing into the sea.

It’s some of the most stunning, dramatic landscape photography I’ve seen on a movie screen.